Changing Identities in Higher Education

Voicing Perspectives

Ronald Barnett, Roberto Di Napoli

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2007
• ISBN:
  9781134092925
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

In this timely and innovative book scholars from Europe, the UK, North America and Australia, explore their own sense of identity, reflecting both on their research and scholarly interests, and their work experiences.

Taking the form of a debate, Changing Identities in Higher Education helps to widen the contemporary space for debates on the future of higher education itself. The book is split into three parts:

• part one presents a set of essays each on a set of identities within higher education (academic, student, administrative/managerial and educational developers).
• part two includes responses to Part one from authors speaking from their own professional and scholarly identity perspective
• part three illustrates perspectives on the identities of students, provided by students themselves.

With its original, dialogic form and varied content, this book is of interest to all those concerned in current debates about the state and nature of higher education today and those interested in questions of identity. It makes especially useful reading for students of higher education, lecturers in training, academics and managers alike.

Chapter 1
Knowledge identities

Marilyn Strathern

This whole collection presents identities and roles in higher education in such a way as to throw light on issues that practitioners take for granted, take in their stride—or grumble about endlessly. Above all it endorses the point that higher education is for many the world within which they must work out their lives. The privilege it offers academic practitioners in particular is the in-built opportunity to use professional knowledge to reflect on one’s own conditions of existence. Perhaps this comes most readily to social scientists, and their colleagues in the humanities, but it is not confined to them.

In this chapter I bring social science into view through a specific discipline, and thus comment on a disciplinary dimension of academic identity. People’s identities are in part forged in the kind of knowledge practices that different disciplines engender. This is not just in terms of shared bodies of knowledge, but rests in the manner in which material is collected, evidence appraised, work criticised and results validated. Assessment of a kind is central. I cannot conceal my disciplinary identity as a social anthropologist nor its particular practices in this regard. At the same time, much of what I say resonates with many of the perspectives offered in the following chapters.

In starting with disciplines, I move to the promise that interdisciplinary endeavour seems to hold these days. The topic is interesting if only because here the traditional virtues of assessment, including appraisal and criticism, seem to run aground. In reflecting on some reasons why this is so, I proffer a contrast between two approaches to educational and research development, one of which stresses the different kinds of identities that disciplinary and interdisciplinary work engender, the other of which would see practitioners managing both identities together. The value of the exercise lies less in the suggestion itself, however, than in the route it takes, and the manner in which substantive knowledge figures in the argument.

Disciplines: generating heat

Callon (1998) takes up an old anthropological contrast between hot and cold societies in a new way, reflecting on changing pressures on the way knowledge is used. In ‘cold’ situations, calculated decisions can be taken with relatively stable measurements of outcomes. He instances the pollution of a watercourse by a chemical factory: sensors are already calibrated, analytical procedures codified, and protagonists know how to calculate the costs before the experts are called in. ‘Hot’ situations, by contrast, arise from the unpredictable criss-crossing of diverse factors, as in the turmoil of BSE¹ where, arguably, a simple economy (to save money by reducing the temperature for processing animal feeds) led to havoc and tragedy. Unforeseen events are commonplace; heat comes from the mix of incommensurate knowledge bases. A network of specialists and non-specialists, diverse interests, policies and research outcomes somehow have to be combined, for as fast as calculations are required the very instruments of measurement have to be created and agreed upon. Hot situations, he argues, become increasingly prevalent as controversies cross boundaries of discipline and skill and it gets increasingly harder to cool them down, that is, reach consensus on how to measure, in this case, what is safe. Hot situations, registered routinely in information overload, are complex phenomena. The challenge of this kind of complexity to specialists (such as anthropologists) and to the university system (which produces almost all and employs many of them) has become a familiar shadow of disciplinary identity and higher education alike.

It is not to be avoided. ‘Supercomplexity’ is the term Barnett (2000) gives to a heated-up world as it looks from the university. He sees an urgent need to embrace it and its uncertainties: to at once heat things up further—generate more uncertainty—and enable people to live with the heat, moving through the uncertain and unpredictable with cooling shields of self-reflexivity. ‘Supercomplexity is the world into which the graduates of universities will go; it marks out the experiences they will face of continual challenge and insecurity’ (Barnett 2000:167). Expertise as such can no longer claim authority—there are simply too many knowledges. This is more than the multiple vision of postmodernism. The supercomplex graduate has to grasp unpredictable intersections of knowledges that fold in on one another. Here Barnett reminds the university of its own educative aspirations, to encourage self-reliance, flexibility and adaptibility, its claim to hold up to society new and counter frames of understanding, and adds a new one. If it can adopt the collective responsibility of attending to supercomplexity, it stands a chance of producing people unafraid either of uncertainty or of making daring interventions. This will require academics, diversified through their relationships with the wider community, working with one another in ‘epistemological pandemonium’.

But haven’t we met supercomplexity elsewhere? Suppose we probe inside disciplines themselves. Here I describe my own, imagining that similar probes may be done into others. One overlooked and currently maligned skill often relegated to the past is that of the anthropologist’s ‘holistic’ approach to data.² However shaky present-day anthropologists would say the theoretical basis of holism was (conceiving such entities as whole societies for a start), imagining holism as an ethnographic goal increased the possibility of tracing through the events that lead to unpredictable outcomes. How so? Because of the simple rule of thumb that nothing was too insignificant to record. So the ethnographer would always record more than was in the line of sight of his or her direct interests. This rule of thumb could also detect ‘hot’ situations. For the heterogeneous data that resulted required interpretation, and interpretation in turn required multiple approaches based on different orders of knowledge (economic trends, semantic domains, religious values), or clusters of them (the relation between biological and social phenomena, between historical and presentist accounts). These well worn divisions demanded that data was modelled in terms of intersection. Additionally, then, anthropological knowledge thus worked on problems through creating matrices that drew on potentially conflicting specialisms within itself.

In short, out of all the ways of navigating a supercomplex world, this discipline has travelled some interesting routes, as I imagine other disciplines have theirs. Anthropology creates for itself incommensurable orders of facts that constantly demand translation and comparison. It offers real-world exemplars to work on, taking a society’s own orientations as given, while encouraging reflexivity through cultivating divergences of understanding, hoping that practitioners will learn how to create hot mixes they can handle. Anthropologists take their identity from this, fine-tuned for many through a second identity with the particular field site in which they are quite arbitrarily caught up (cf. Corsín Jiménez 2004). Here, if truth be told, an anthropological field site can be anywhere—but it has to be somewhere.

Disciplines: different ways of cooling heat

You would have supposed, then, that anthropologists might have been at least a little open to the audit practices that, running through most public service provisions, found a field site in UK higher education some twenty years ago. I refer to evaluations of teaching and research through what became the Quality Assurance Agency (QAA) and the still active Research Assessment Exercise (RAE). Incommensurable orders of facts are created and then compared (depending on the exercise, committee agendas, paper trails, student ratings, mission statements, and published outputs, selection of the research active, research strategy, funding income, and so forth). This is all with the aim of describing—before assessing —whole institutions in terms of their teaching and research functioning. Assessment is made in the light of their own orientations. So why do anthropologists join so many other academic practitioners and grumble that their identity is being assaulted?

Audit encourages just the skills Barnett sees within the university system, though as outcomes not so much for individuals as for the system as such. Audit hopes to galvanise that system into consciously promoting such skills and learning, to be reflexive about its own practices. It thus adds a layer of activity that claims to be independent of disciplinary content: the QAA is judging not the discipline itself but its effective management for the purposes of teaching, while the RAE is designed to measure research accomplishment, and in such a way as to allow peer review to deal with content. At its best, this hands-off approach to disciplinary substance is just that. But, at its worst, the distance conceals substantive demands of its own. Audit is in effect about creating a certain kind, its own kind, of knowledge. The auditing remit is simple: how does the system know it is performing properly? The performance in question is not of students and teachers and researchers but of the university as an organisation and of research as product. Let me speak briefly of teaching and the QAA as it was instigated in 1997. For, if in the UK we have since moved on from the early days of the QAA, higher education institutions have taken (had to take) on its mantle themselves, and a backward glance is salutary.

The QAA’s learning and teaching audit wanted the organisation to demonstrate its organisational capacities of not just good practices but specifically those good practices that show the organisation in action. How does a university keep track of itself; how does it meet its own aims and objectives; how does it guarantee the learning outcomes it promises; how can it demonstrate the procedures by which it knows that this is what it is doing? Evaluation is needed. Students’ work must be marked in relation to specified learning outcomes; if skills are imparted, the system must be able to point to where these are assessed. And only a paper trail can measure the measurements. The paper trail makes transparent a genealogy of decision-making, implementation and outcome, in short, at once mimics and instantiates management procedure. Focus on the measurable and recordable deletes anything imponderable and unpredictable. For only some activities will count as organisational ‘good practice’, above all communication (do different parts of the organisation communicate with one another?) and feedback (are there good channels for recording response to decisions taken?).

Was this knowledge worth having? In some situations, yes. But it was also a diversion. In a climate of performativity, observes Barnett, processes receive low marks. He means those processes by which the university should instead have been gearing up for an age of supercomplexity. The balance-sheet approach concerned with outcomes is insufficient to the point of actively discouraging institutions from looking to their responsibilities (see also Mills 2004:27).

Academics’ expressions of identity assault speak to another danger: that teachers collude with learners in the triple fantasy that communication is by nature transparent, that specifiable skills are the desirable outcome and that substance (types and bodies of knowledge) does not matter. One problem with the QAA kind of knowledge is that skills are conflated with performance indicators: the skills are all performance-positive. Doubt and uncertainty, not by any stretch of the imagination performance-positive, may mould modes of being (in Barnett’s phrase) but will not show up as skill-related. Yet ‘flexibility’ is nothing without uncertainty to give it an edge, ‘confidence’ is shallow without doubt, ‘reflexivity’ cannot develop if there are no crises to work it against, ‘communication skills’ are untried until there is a dilemma to solve. Above all, ‘clarity’ depends on the kind of puzzle that gets the intellect into knots before it begins to release comprehension. Yet where is the discussion of how to evaluate the crises and dilemmas that study inculcates, the puzzling obscurities students tussle over, the time it takes problems to be worked through? Sometimes such situations speak of desperate dead-ends; but sometimes they motivate just the kind of mind-work that will enable the student to handle the unpredictable. The point is that we don’t know in advance! If the QAA’s intention was that teachers should banish unpredictability from the curriculum, what then of the mission to prepare students for a real world where they have to be uncertain and still act, have doubts and still know what to do, encounter the unforeseen and carry on?

Substance matters. There are different ways of presenting complexity to the imagination, and they are not all equally good. If you imagine hot conditions for teaching and learning blowing like a blast from a furnace, the thought follows that the stokers must keep the fire going while themselves needing personal cooling devices. If instead you imagine hot conditions like soup in winter, then its warmth will limber you up; cold soup would stiffen the muscles and cramp the stomach—until, that is, summer comes and the positive and negative values are reversed. The former imagining (Barnett’s model) suggests one may need to know how to be hot and cold at the same time: the calculations intersect unpredictably. The latter (the QAA’s model) creates one-way measurements: how far along the scale of being either hot or cold you are, the unpredictable element being instead in the hands of auditors who determine what season of the year it is, and thus which is desirable. To my mind, only one of these apprehensions of complexity has substance worth spending time on.

The feeling of identity loss some of the authors in the chapters to follow depict, and challenge, may come in part from the tacit nature of much disciplinary practice, often mute in relation to the fundamental skill of assembling substantive ‘knowledge’ (materials, data, information) appropriate to one’s tools. Yet explicit procedures of quality evaluation often seem to increase rather than diminish the sense of disciplinary loss. So many practitioners swing from embracing disciplines to instead embracing interdisciplinary approaches. Indeed, ‘interdisciplinarity’ has new value these days in the eyes of some (mission-statement writers, research council policy-makers) as a means to impart ‘heat’ to what are seen as ‘cold. subject areas. However, in the spirit of the above remarks, this resembles the QAA model (hot or cold); perhaps by contrast, then, Barnett’s model holds an alternative promise (hot and cold). If one can advocate both interdisciplinary and disciplinary endeavours, then each should heat and cool the other in interesting ways.

Interclisciplinarity: reconfiguring assessment

So we have not quite finished with disciplines yet. It would be mischievous for academics to suggest that the QAA is based on values at arm’s length from their own. It is very much part of the higher education field: we share identities here (Brenneis 1994). Auditing and evaluation find analogues in disciplinary work itself and, in the anthropological case I describe, in the very social practices that research in particular may reveal. The case assembles some substantive knowledge, the results of research, to make the point.

There is a moment in the course of Fijian gift-giving when the givers’ side ‘subjects itself to the gift-receivers’ evaluation, and quietly hopes that the other side will respond positively’ (Miyazaki 2004:7). Motionless, the givers’ spokesman holds out the object until a recipient steps forward and takes it. ‘In this moment of hope, the...

Table of contents

• Key Issues in Higher Education Series
• Contents
• Illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Contributors
• Introduction
• Preamble
• Chapter 1 Knowledge identities
• Part I Perspectives
• Part II Responses
• Part III The students’ views
• Bibliography
• Index